In a computer environment, a collection of equipment may provide functionality, such as e-mail. The collection of equipment may include a whole network of computers and objects that work together. A diagram of that network may be referred to a service model. Operations graphs of service models can be very large and complex, especially when cloud computing objects and virtual objects are involved. These operations graphs may show the relationships between objects and the status of each object. An important type of relationship is an impacting relationship, which means that a child object can impact the status or health of a parent object. The child object supplies resources to the parent object so the parent object can accomplish its tasks. If a child object goes down, then the parent object is negatively affected. When an object is impacted negatively by its child objects, an operations graph may show this by changing the visual appearance of the relationship path between the objects. For example if a child (such as a storage server) is causing the parent (such as an e-mail server) to go critical, it changes a relationship indicator. The user can then see which child is causing the parent to go critical.
The graph, however, is merely a snapshot of one moment in time and therefore it only shows the current relationships and the current status and causes. With the advent of virtual objects and cloud, however, an object's children may change over time as resources are automatically shifted about to handle demand. An object's status may change from red-green-red-green over time as a “bad” child moves in-out-in-out of relationship to the object. Therefore, if a user is trying to determine which child object is habitually causing problems for a parent object, the user must “catch” the graph before the “bad child” automatically shifts out from under the parent object.
In many cases, a problem can be much more complex than a single child causing an issue. For example, there may be a unique combination of certain children causing one or more issues. A snapshot view of a graph does not make it easy to identify the causal patterns in such an environment. Accordingly, there exists a need for systems and methods to address the shortfalls of present technology and to provide other new and innovative features.